Overseas Enquiries Answered While the Visitor Sleeps

Questions that arrive overnight

A lodge owner opens the inbox at eight in the morning to find enquiries sent overnight from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan. Each asks one or two questions about a stay in July or August.

The replies go out by mid-morning. By then it is evening in Europe and the middle of the night in Japan. Each visitor reads the answer a day later and writes back with the next question.

Three or four exchanges take most of a week. Somewhere in that week, some of them book a place that answered everything at once.

A day for every question

In summer, BC is eight hours behind London, nine behind Berlin and sixteen behind Tokyo. A reply sent at nine in the morning reaches Berlin at six in the evening and Tokyo at one the next morning.

The working days barely overlap. Every question and answer costs the visitor a day, while they keep reading about other lodges and tours.

The lodge rarely hears why a conversation ended. The visitor simply stopped writing.

What overseas visitors ask

The questions are predictable, which is what makes them answerable in advance:

• Dates and availability for the weeks they have in mind.
• The full price in Canadian dollars, with taxes and extras.
• What is included, from meals and equipment to transfers.
• Getting there from the nearest airport or ferry, with or without a car.
• Payment and deposits, including which cards are accepted.
• Cancellation, and what happens if a flight is delayed.
• Children, with ages, beds and any limits on activities.

Each one left off the website becomes a question in an email, and each question costs a day.

Answers on the page, not in the inbox

Put every answer where a visitor deciding would look for it: prices on the rates page, travel times on the location page, the deposit and cancellation terms beside the place to book.

A short page for visitors from abroad can gather the practical points: currency, cards, driving distances, the nearest airport, and what a typical day looks like.

Write it plainly. Many readers use English as a second language, and some will run the page through a translation tool, which copes far better with short sentences.

Booking without an exchange

The surest way to stop losing a day per question is to let visitors book without asking any. An availability calendar with online booking and a deposit lets them settle the trip in their own evening.

Where live booking does not suit the business, a request form can collect everything a firm reply needs: dates, number of guests, ages of children, room or tour choice, and arrival plans.

Either way, an automatic confirmation should arrive at once, stating what was booked or requested and when a person will reply.

A reply that settles everything

When an email does arrive, answer the question asked and the two that usually follow it. A question about August dates calls for the price, the deposit and how to book as well.

Give availability as a fact, hold the space for a stated time, and include links to the relevant pages. End with the step to take, not with a question.

If something genuinely has to be asked, ask everything in one message, numbered, so the visitor can answer in one reply.

A worked example

A pie shop on a highway through fruit-growing country, a few hours from Vancouver, sells fruit pies, coffee and light lunches. In summer, coach tours stop there on the way to the mountains.

Many of those tours are planned by companies in Europe and Asia, and their planners wrote to the shop months ahead, nearly always overnight.

A typical exchange asked whether the shop could seat a group, then what a set lunch would cost, then where a coach could park, then how to pay. Each answer took a day.

Some planners stopped writing partway through, and the shop later learned they had chosen a stop further along the highway.

The website now has a page for group stops: seating for one coach, two set menus with prices per person including taxes, the hours groups can be served, coach parking, washrooms and how the deposit is paid.

A form on that page takes the date, arrival time, group size and menu choice, and confirms at once. Planners who still write get one reply covering all of it, with the time slot held for two days.

A planner can now settle the stop in one sitting during their own working day, without waiting for BC's.

Writing for readers abroad

Write dates with the month in words, since 6/8 means June to some readers and August to others. Give times with the time zone, on either the twelve-hour or the twenty-four-hour clock.

Use kilometres and Canadian dollars, and explain local names such as ferries, highways and mountain passes, which mean nothing to someone who has never been here.

Checking the inbox at the right hours

A quick look at the inbox late in the evening, or very early, catches messages from Europe while the sender may still be awake to read the reply.

It does not replace the page or the form, but it can save a whole day on the enquiries that still arrive by email.

The counter-case

A business whose guests come mostly from the province or from Washington State shares their working day, and loses little time to the exchange.

A high-end, made-to-measure trip is different again: the conversation is part of what the guest is buying, and no form can replace it.

In both cases, the predictable answers still belong on the page, and each reply should be complete. The aim is fewer rounds of questions, not fewer conversations.

Fewer rounds of questions

1. Read a month of enquiries and list the questions.
2. Answer each one on the page a visitor would check.
3. State prices in full, in Canadian dollars with taxes.
4. Offer booking or a complete request form on the site.
5. Send an instant confirmation with the next step.
6. Write replies that answer ahead, with links and a hold.
7. Check the inbox late in the evening as well.

Step one sets the agenda for everything after it. The questions in last month's emails are the website's missing paragraphs, written by the people the site failed to answer.

Once those visitors are travelling, the same pages have to load on costly roaming data and weak hotel Wi-Fi, a problem taken up in tourists reading your site on roaming data.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.